Signing in, and where you are

Shipbuilder runs in a browser and asks for a username and a password.

1 Username — normally your e-mail address, in lower case. 2 Your password. Nobody should be sharing one. 3 Enter works as well as the button.

The sign-in page. Your username is normally your e-mail address, in lower case.

The sign-in page. Your username is normally your e-mail address, in lower case.

Where it brings you

Signing in opens the application on the workspace you had open last. The first time there is none, and the page says so:

1 The workspace selector — start here. 2 Your initials: the account menu.

No workspace chosen yet. Everything else waits for the selector.

No workspace chosen yet. Everything else waits for the selector.

Choosing a workspace

A workspace is one project: its own documents, its own spaces, its own history. The selector lists the workspaces you have been given access to, and you can type in it to find one by name.

1 Type here to search the list by name. 2 A workspace. Its name is what the project is called, not a code. 3 A portal of that workspace — the same data through a different menu; see below.

Open the selector and pick a workspace. Type part of its name to narrow the list.

Open the selector and pick a workspace. Type part of its name to narrow the list.

Picking a workspace loads its menu and lands you on its Dashboard. From then on the selector shows the name of the workspace you are in — glance at it before you change anything, because two workspaces look identical apart from that name.

In this training

Your own workspace is named after a ship, with your name after it — MT Waalhaven — Anna Trainee. The Open workspace link at the top of this site takes you straight into it, so you should rarely see the selector at all. If you do, that name is the one to look for.

Portals: one workspace, several menus

Under a workspace the selector may show indented rows — Client, here. A portal is the same workspace through a different menu, arranged for one role: the Main portal is the yard’s full menu; the Client portal is what the owner gets — the register and the transmittals, read-only apart from the comments they may add. Switching portal changes what the menu offers, not what the data is.

1 The selector names the portal after the workspace. 2 A shorter menu: what the owner needs, and nothing to edit.

The Client portal of the same workspace: the selector says which portal you are in, the menu is the owner's, the records are the same.

The Client portal of the same workspace: the selector says which portal you are in, the menu is the owner's, the records are the same.

An environment is not a workspace

Two things in the top of the window tell you where you are, and they are easy to confuse.

The environment is the address in the browser’s bar. An installation comes in a pair — a test environment, updated continuously, and a production one, updated on Monday nights — and they are separate installations with separate data. The screens are identical, which is exactly the problem.

The workspace is the selector in the top right. Same environment, different project.

Read the address bar before you change anything

“I made the change but it isn’t there” is, more often than anything else, a change made in the test environment and looked for in production. There is no warning banner. The address bar and the workspace selector are the only two things that distinguish them.

The account menu

Your initials, top right, open it.

1 Your initials open it. A dot here means there are release notes you have not read. 2 Who you are signed in as, and your role. 3 The theme: System follows your operating system. 4 What's new — everything that changed in the last release. 5 Log out is here and nowhere else.

The account menu — who you are signed in as, the theme, what changed, and the way out.

The account menu — who you are signed in as, the theme, what changed, and the way out.

• Who you are — your name, your e-mail address and your role. Worth a glance when the application refuses you something: the answer is sometimes that you are signed in as somebody else, or with less than you thought.
• The theme — System, Light or Dark.
• What’s new — the release notes, newest first. See Getting help for when they appear.
• About — the version. Quote it when you report a problem.
• Log out — which is here and nowhere else, and is the first thing people cannot find.